


Visitations

by dreadwulf



Series: Unnamed Fenabela series [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Doing terrible things to Fenris, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-26 01:04:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/959758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadwulf/pseuds/dreadwulf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenris is gone, but Isabela cannot let him go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First

Fenris had begun to visit Isabela almost a year after he had died.

He came in her dreams, appearing to her whenever she found herself wandering from other landscapes the Fade had conjured up for her into the Captain’s Quarters, that familiar bedroom on her last ship where she and Fenris had spent so much of their time together. She wasn’t sure quite how she did it, but whenever she tired of her usual dreams she would simply walk away from them and drift along the border of that story until she found a familiar wooden door and opened it and found herself home.

It was a small space, though it had always felt large in the cramped spaces of a tall ship. The walls and floor were lined with a finer quality of dark wood, and a window with real glass revealed the endless sea outside and the moonlight spilling itself across it. There was her desk, with her maps spread across it, her inks and quills and the many scribbled notes jammed into the slots and crevices. There was a small table, with bread and cheese and maybe strawberries and (always) a glass of wine. Through an archway and down a single stair was the bed, large and solid in the room that just barely fit it.

Many adventures had been had in that bed, with many bedmates. Many more mundane moments too. She had slept in it alone, stretched across it sideways with room to spare in every direction, and she had filled it with pretty boys and girls who beckoned to her to come back to bed. More often than not, Fenris had awaited her in that bed. Unclothed, perhaps looking at a book, or idly tending some wound he had gotten at her command. They had tended each other’s wounds often, in this bed. Including those wounds that could not be bandaged and which might never heal. But - as the two of them knew better than most - such injuries could be soothed, at least, if not mended.

During his illness Isabela had counted many long hours awake in this bed as he slept, listening to his breathing to be certain he was still there with her, and time had seemed to slow to a crawl. In the daylight they had pretended still that all was well and little mattered but their freedom and their fun, but in the night she could feel the precious minutes slipping by like sand through an hourglass and she found herself taking care to notice each one. She would leave a candle burning at her desk and watch the light flicker over the elf’s drawn and haunted face in the featherbed they had shared together. They traveled the world in this way, bringing this bed with them, adventuring across the seas in the day and enclosed in their own small world in the night.

Until the morning he had not awoken and their time together had run out. 

When she returned to her quarters for the first time without him, sleeping in that bed had been almost unbearable. Isabela had worked her men and herself into utter exhaustion before retiring to her quarters, and had gone straight to bed, snuffing the light so not to look too long upon that room. When she crawled into their bed she could still smell him in the sheets. Fenris. There and not there. All through the night she tossed and turned and did not sleep.

She spent some time on land after that, sending her ship away without her to do its business. Without the sea to anchor her Isabela felt adrift, with nothing solid to capture her attention. She took lovers and left them, sometimes even before consummating her flirtations. She hunted for treasure and then abandoned it, disappointed with each result. Food and drink and pipe smoke had all lost their flavor, had become boring, like everything else.

She felt unreal, unmoored.

She saw Aveline and Donnic often, during that period. Their grief had been acute at Fenris’s death; he had been close to them both, a part of the family as surely as their own children, as each other. Now they opened their home to her with new enthusiasm, as if hoping to fill the chasm he had left behind. Isabela never stayed long. A house on land, children, steady employment; all of these things were not for her. But still she returned, again and again, drawn by a sort of dull longing that she could not explain.

Fenris had loved them all, and that love was real to the Hendyrs in a way it had never been for her. Their relationship as a family had been open and giving and all those sorts of things of which she was incapable. That love had built their house as surely as their own hands, and she could sense some measure of that every time she walked inside. It was a sturdy house, solid and permanent. Perhaps that was why she had avoided it until now, that sense of permanence.

This was a part of Fenris’s life that she had not shared in.  Some animal instinct in her was hoping to catch a glimpse of him there, this Fenris that she hadn’t known, around a corner, at Aveline’s table, standing over the children in their beds. In time this memory, this ghostly presence, would drive her away, too, as surely as it had summoned her. This love she could see but not touch, that did not include her.

In time her ship returned, and she rushed to it. Ready or not, it was time to leave this shore, and she had missed the sea.

Her cabin remained untouched, just as she had left it. But it felt curiously empty now, in a way she could not explain until she had laid down upon the bed and realized that she could no longer smell him in the sheets. Every trace of him was gone.

She cried then, as she had rarely done in her life. Every bit of the emptiness that had filled every part of her spilled out in a torrent.

Just before dawn, she finally slipped almost imperceptibly into the Fade, finding herself in the same room, in the same bed, but  _ **in his arms.**_  Though she could not see his face she knew it was Fenris; she could feel his hot breath against her neck and hear him murmuring to her as he stroked her hair. For a timeless time she was with Fenris again, and all was well.

Isabela awoke to a sense of lightness, and of relief, that she had not known in a long time.


	2. Second

For a while he came often. Whenever Isabela wanted to find Fenris, she only had to seek out her quarters on the Sea Witch, and lie down in her bed, and his arms would come around her and that familiar voice would speak in her ear, and his lips would ghost across her cheek. It was very much as it had been when he was alive, whenever he had come back to her after some time away. After their lovemaking they would lay back upon their bed and he would fold her up into his embrace, and she would tell him of all the adventures she had had without him. It was the same in her dreams. Only now she would allow herself to call him darling, and he would call her his pirate queen.

If she ever turned her head to look at him she would awaken from the dream immediately without a single glimpse of him. This limitation was hard and fast and she had tested it many times. Long hours in dreamtime would go by where she could feel him all around her and speak to him and hear his reply, but she could never look at him, could not even catch a glimpse of his hands on her, without immediately opening her eyes alone.  

But she welcomed him every time, and told him all about her adventures. How she started a lucrative new trade of Chasind glass, which the Antivans were positively mad for.About the new islands she had found, with strange animals on them that no one had ever heard of, and how she had taken a bird with them in a cage. Eventually it had escaped — or maybe now that she mentioned it she had left the cage door open, when it had started to pull its feathers out, and it had flown away.

Often she found he already knew these things before she could tell him. At first it made her suspect he was truly only a figment of her imagination, knowing everything she knew. But sometimes he would say something she had no way of knowing, and it would turn out to be true.

It was in one of these dreams that she had learned Anders had died, that he had thrown himself into an unwinnable confrontation with Fereldan templars rather than go to his Calling. When she had gotten the letter from Hawke, days later, all of the details only confirmed what she had already known, to an eerie extent.

“How did you know?” Isabela asked him later, in his embrace.

 _I am not sure_ , Fenris confessed.  _I think he told me. We actually spoke, somehow, and without arguing. It was almost pleasant._

“Where is he now?” she whispered drowsily, feeling a hand rubbing up and down her shoulder pleasingly. “Is he around?”

 _He has gone on,_  Fenris told her. He would not elaborate on what that meant, but she would hear that phrase again, when she asked about other friends, or crew members, who had fallen.  _They have gone on._

Isabela did not much reflect upon what those words meant, but she hoped that Fenris would not do the same any time soon.

****  
  


In her waking hours, life went on much as it has in the days before Kirkwall. Her crew pulled their weight; they plundered and pillaged. Her ship grew laden with treasures of all kinds, with the finest food, the finest drink, and the finest sailors and swashbucklers they picked up along the way. She pulled daring escapes, audacious maneuvers, she targeted bigger ships with more men and came away the victor. There would be more ships, in time. The Queen of the Eastern Seas would assemble her own fleet, one few would dare to challenge.

Her legend grew.

From her desk she mapped the world. An explorer at heart, Isabela loved to fill in the blank places in the atlas, the Here Be Dragons places. Piracy had few surprises left for her, but this map-making was a growing interest. She would carefully plot out new shores, add undiscovered settlements of strange peoples with their lucrative trading posts, and locate precisely new sources of ore, bananas, lyrium, wild game, anything that might conceivably prove profitable. Wherever possible, she would name these new destinations herself, and letter them elaborately on her private maps.

She had new lovers, of course. Isabela took young men and women to her bed, sometimes several at a time. She had favorites, even friends. Old companions from Ferelden and Kirkwall would travel with her at times - Merrill balancing precariously on railings and pointing excitedly, Zevran flirting his way from one continent to the next - and she often took them to bed as well. Loneliness had never been her problem; there was no shortage of new friends any place she cared to travel. The world was full of fascinating people - so long as you patted them down for knives first.

However much she enjoyed sharing her bed, it was the elf’s arms she slept in. She would slip imperceptibly from her lovers’ grasp in the night and enter the Fade, and Fenris would be there. Somehow it would be just the two of them, and the starlight smeared across the water, and she would pull his arms around her and be glad of it. Sometimes she could hear his deep, rumbling laugh reverberating in her ears at her antics before she had even joined him in sleep.

It was after one of these wild nights that she had broken the rules.

Isabela had left a trio of Nevarran maidens giggling in her bed, a few feet from her sleeping, well satisfied body, and Fenris was laughing at her.  _Your creativity never ceases to amaze me. As well as your… stamina. Even those girls half your age cannot keep up._

Isabela had frowned at that.

Her dreams had acquired a disquiet that she was more and more unable to laugh off. Though she treasured these visits, the limitation of not being able to see him was beginning to bother her. She could feel the solidity of him around her, but she could not catch even a glimpse of him no matter how hard she tried.

The pirate queen found herself beginning to forget what her most familiar lover had looked like. The pattern of the lyrium on his skin that she had once known as well as her own features was slowly fading from her memory. She wished now that they had a portrait done, a drawing, something. If she could just see him for a moment, enough to remember…

Isabela stood from the bed, escaping his embrace. “I’m getting older,” she said. She could get up and wander around the room, sometimes, if she did not look back. She drifted towards her desk, and picked up the ornate hand mirror in one of the drawers. “I’m getting old, and you will be young forever.”

 _I would not have minded a few wrinkles,_  she heard him remark, perhaps a little sorrowfully.

“I won’t be beautiful anymore, and you will stop coming to see me.” She pouted into the mirror. Her dismay was exaggerated, but the crow’s feet were real, and so were the bits of grey creeping into her hair.

 _You will always be beautiful, my pirate queen,_ he told her.  _But I should stop this, you know. It is not fair to you._

“Don’t ever stop. Don’t you dare,” Isabela said into the mirror. She realized all at once that she could see the window behind her in the mirror, and if she just turned it a little bit…

 _Don’t,_ he warned her.

The room swung around in the mirror’s reflection and then she saw him. Fenris, her handsome pirate elf, sat reclining against the wall, his arms folded in front of him. He looked exactly as he had looked when he had died - his white hair, his green eyes, strikingly handsome and wry and fond.

She gasped as she saw him for the first time in seven years, and the mirror slipped from her hands and shattered on the floor. She awoke sobbing, much to the alarm of the young girls sleeping beside her. Choking with tears, her grief as fresh and raw as it had been on the day he died. 

Fenris did not come for a long time after that.


	3. Last

 Eventually, Isabela let go of her ships. Kept ownership, of course, but appointed new captains - trustworthy ones, who would deliver her share of the take and knew full well she would cut their throats if they didn’t. After a supervisory period where she observed their progress, Isabela came ashore and let her ships sail on without her.

It was difficult, the letting go. But someone else could shout at the men for awhile. It was beginning to tire her. The long years at sea had left an ache in her bones that no amount of rum could mend.

Besides, she was ready for a new challenge.

She had always joked that she ought to run a brothel one day, and she had taken more than one working girl under her wing during her time in Kirkwall. When the opportunity presented itself to take over the Pearl, she rose to the challenge. She certainly had the money nowadays, and it would be handy to have a semi-legitimate business to channel funds through.

She changed very little about the Pearl, but the transition to land was rocky. One could not order about courtesans like crewmen. They tended to abandon ship, with dry land readily available. You could not terrify or threaten them into obedience. These girls feared nothing; they trusted only themselves, and good coin.

Of course, Isabela understood this better than most. In time, and with better profits, she could cast herself as a mentor of sorts. An ally. One with a keen business sense, and a handy skill with knives, that they would be unlikely to find anywhere else. The Pearl was successful, well-reputed, and safe under her care.

By then she had not dreamt of Fenris in a long time. Long enough that she could shrug them off as silly dreams, fantasies she had concocted. She tried not to think about him, for the most part. There was no sense in dwelling on the past, and she had a lot of life left to live.

But she had kept the cask of lyrium that he had left her, the very lyrium that had once marked his skin. The metal urn sat heavily on a shelf in her office. She told herself that in an emergency she could sell the lyrium as Fenris had intended her to. Pure and concentrated lyrium would fetch a fortune on the market, particularly now that mages could live openly and work their magics. She called it her insurance policy. Even though as years went by it became less and less likely that she would ever be able to part with it.

* * *

Merrill was the one who put it all together.

She had traveled often on Isabela’s ships, looking for a new clan. In the end she had started her own. One of outcast elves, Alienage elves, blood mages, heretics, others who had no place with the Dalish but wished to live in the wilds.

Still she had come to visit Isabela at the Pearl. A surprise visit, very unexpected: Keeper Merrill rarely left her people. But Isabela was her best friend in the world, and she would surely bless her new home with all that the Dalish had to offer.

The Keeper had been hunting around Isabela’s office and fussing with her things, and she found the last bit of Fenris still in this world sitting on her shelf. She picked up the cask of lyrium and said “oh!”

Very brightly, she looked around the room until Isabela gave in and asked her what she was doing.

“Um,” Merrill said fretfully, “Don’t be alarmed, but I think… have you seen any spirits around?”

Isabela’s eyes went wide. “Fenris,” she said immediately. It was real? Not a dream?

“So you have, then? Oh good. I was worried I would frighten you,” Merrill smiled, relieved.

Isabela crossed the room in a moment, moving much faster than she looked capable of. She grasped her friend by the shoulders.  

“You can see him? Fenris, is he…. here? Now?”

Merrill said gently, “I think he’s always here. This,” she held up the lyrium, “it ties him to this world. When it was in his body, it kept him partly in the spirit world. That’s how he could do the things he did. Now  _he’s_  there, and it’s still here, in the physical world. It was part of him, so he can always find it. And since you have it, he can find you.”

Isabela frowned. “Is he trapped here?”

The Keeper shook her head. “No, I think he could go if he wanted to. Oh, he’s getting very cross with me now, I shouldn’t say any more.” Her face screwed up unhappily, grimacing at an unseeable presence that seemed to flit about the room in an agitated fashion.

Isabela gripped her shoulders urgently. “Then why doesn’t he talk to me anymore? Ask him.”

Merrill looked around. Her face grew thoughtful. Carefully she settled the urn on Isabela’s great rosewood desk, and she spoke with equal care.

“He wanted to watch over you, I think. For you not to be alone. But he was worried that it was hurting you, that you weren’t moving on from him. He thought if he left you alone, you would be better off. And…” Merrill bit her lip, her eyes darting from Isabela’s face to somewhere in the center of the room. “He’s right, you know. He isn’t meant to be here anymore. He should have gone on ages ago. And it isn’t good for you.”

“Merrill,” Isabela began to say, and then turned away. She leaned on her desk, pushing down hard with her palm until the wood began to creak.

“You won’t understand, I know. He didn’t like you, and he could be horrible when he didn’t like someone. But when he did… there was nobody more loyal in all the world. That’s a precious thing, kitten. As rare and precious as any treasure. And I didn’t really know it until he was gone.”

Isabela reached over to the urn. She ran her hand over and over the embossment on the urn, unthinkingly, and spoke in an unfamiliar and faraway tone.

“I thought I was better off alone too. I knew people would only let you down in the end, especially if you let yourself count on them. So I didn’t. Not even Fenris. I was always ready for him to betray me someday, the way everyone did. I thought we could just…. enjoy ourselves until that day came. But instead he — he died. And then I knew.” She stopped, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “He never turned on me, never ran out on me, never once. I could have trusted him completely. He was devoted to me and it was for real and I wasted it. Do you see, Merrill? The one person I could have trusted completely and I wasted it.”

Tears glistened in her eyes, and she wiped at them irritably, cursing herself and Fenris and everyone and the stupid world they had to live in. What a stupid, horrible mistake, to love someone. How horrible it was to love, when death would always take them from you, one way or the other, no matter what you did.

Merrill approached her hesitantly, putting a gentle arm around her. “You should tell him that. Tell him good-bye. So you can both move on.”

Isabela shook her head stubbornly. “Not if I don’t have to. Maybe other lovers have to part, but not us, not while I have this…” She clung to the lyrium urn, looking around. “This is a gift. You hear me, Fenris? A gift! You and I had shit luck our whole lives, but we get this. We don’t have to say goodbye. So come back to me. Okay? Come back to me,” she finished forlornly, speaking into the empty space in front of her, not sure there was anyone still there to hear her.

Keeper Merrill nodded, looking thoughtfully at something only she could see.

* * *

Fenris came again that night. She went to sleep in her chambers behind the office, and woke up in her Captain’s Quarters, back on the Sea Witch, where she hadn’t set foot in ages and ages.

_I’m sorry_ _,_  he whispered to her, over and over. Holding her tightly.  _I will never leave you again._

Nothing else needed to be said.

* * *

A time of contentment, now, and peace.

Isabela was Madam of the Pearl for many years, and maintained her fleet of pirate vessels all the while. Her machinations earned her both money and influence, even respect. She pulled strings for her friends, even the most powerful ones: for the King of Ferelden, and for his sons; for Aveline’s children, for Hawke’s soldiers, for the handsomest men in Denerim and the most beautiful girls in the known world. Everyone came to the Pearl sooner or later.

She had other projects as well. In the hidden rooms she had commissioned and under her protection, she provided a safe and discreet hiding place for women on the run. No questions asked, no money required — although many of them did repay her in the end, generously.

Isabela  took much satisfaction from this. Perhaps more than from anything else she had ever done.

She did not always see Fenris, but she knew he would be nearby, and it gave her comfort. She could always find him when she needed him. He waited for her, in her dreams,  in their Quarters. All she had to do was look for him, and he would be there.

* * *

The White Fever blazed through Denerim one winter. Healers could do little to stop it, once the infection set in. Several of her girls took to bed before Isabela closed The Pearl, hoping to keep the sickness out, but it was far too late. It wasn’t long before the Madam collapsed herself, was found unconscious in her office, already burning with illness, shaking with chills.

Her favorite lover held her through the fever, stroking her hair, comforting her. She talked to him constantly.  _It hurts, Fenris, it hurts. My whole body aches. And I’m so cold…_

The healers shook their heads and said she was delirious - and she was, but her murmurs were heard just the same, and answered.  _It will pass. Be brave just a little longer._

She spent more time dreaming of the Sea Witch and the sea than she did awake, her body twisting in the bed, her spirit somewhere far away.

In her Quarters, she felt the fever break. Her head cleared, and the sweat began to dry from her forehead. She sat up cautiously, expecting pain, dizziness, nausea. But there was nothing, not even the dull old ache in her bones that she had grown so used to. She felt wonderful. Stretched her arms out to either side, luxuriously, enjoying the sensation of the cool sheets around her. Breathed in the salt sea air, deep and easy, into untroubled lungs.

There across the room was a patch of sunlight, creeping across the cabin.

_Look,_ she told Fenris.  _The sun’s coming up._

She left the bed and rushed to the window. It was a spectacular sunrise, painting the sky a multitude of vivid colors. It felt warm on her face, and she grinned happily.

_It’s beautiful,_ she said.  _I can’t remember the last time I saw the sunrise over the sea…_

It must have been years ago. She couldn’t think how long. It didn’t seem important, anyway. All that mattered was now. The endless now.

Her head turned almost of its own volition.

Fenris was standing beside her. But when she looked at him, she did not wake. She could finally see him clearly. Her Fenris. Lanky, stubborn elf, slim and pretty, with eyes like jewels and hair like snow. The same as the day she had lost him. But with a look of disbelief on his face, one that told her this was  **real** , this was really happening.

She was suddenly flooded with joy.

He opened his arms to her, and she rushed into them. They stood together in the sunlight for a long time, holding each other tightly.

_Oh, Isabela,_ he said to her, his voice choked with tears.  _I hated to see you so ill, I truly hoped you would recover. But I have missed you so very much. I have waited so long…_

She couldn’t speak for a long time. She just ran her hands over him, his chest and his arms and his darling familiar face. He was exactly the same, but something was different… It took time to  realize it was his tattoos. They were still there, but their light had gone dim. The lyrium had gone. They were just marks on the surface of his skin now, not deep gouges of scar tissue. Just the idea of the brands, and not the ruined skin left behind by the ritual that had stolen so much of his life.  

She ran her hands over them, and he did not flinch. The lyrium could not hurt him anymore.  _I’m so glad,_ she told him finally.  _You’ve waited here for me?_

_Not always here,_  he said into her ear. _Sometimes by your side. Sometimes… elsewhere._

Isabela turned her face to the window. She supposed she would find out what he meant soon. The sun on the waves was too bright to see very far. Whether there was land or endless waves out there — could be either, really. The sky was very blue, though, and the winds were blowing, and that was promising. If there was anything beyond this room, it would be something entirely new. Unmapped territory, ready to be explored. A stir of excitement filled her.

_There’s something out there, isn’t there?_ she asked, turning back to him.  _I can feel it calling me._

_Yes,_ Fenris said.  _I’ve felt it too, at times. But I have been happy to stay behind, to watch the world. To watch you. But now I will go with you wherever you wish, for as long as you want me by your side._

She watched his mouth making the words, her face turned up to his, hands on his shoulders. She had missed it, that mouth. Those lips.

She could watch him forever, easily. Whatever else came, she could do that.

Isabela took his hands, and she kissed him. A long, lingering kiss, as warm as the sunrise at her back. 

_Come on,_  she told him when they had finished, with a devilish grin.  _Let’s see what’s out there._

And they walked out together, into the next adventure.


End file.
